For the scenes set at the factory where Fantine (Anne Hathaway) works making rosary beads, production designger Eve Stewart had to employ a bit of ingenuity to prevent the din of the tedious task from interfering with dialogue—the designer noise-proofed the beads by coating them in rubber. “We also had to use rubber and velvet on the horses’ feet so you could not hear the clacking,” she explains of yet another problem in working on a period-piece musical.

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The stately grounds of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, were transformed into the Place de la Bastille, the square where the Bastille prison stood. Originally conceived by Napoléon as a symbol of victory, the 40-foot-tall elephant is front and center at French commander Jean Maximilien Lamarque’s funeral procession and and the subsequent student uprising. Producer Cameron Mackintosh was so fond of the pachyderm that after production he had it moved it to his home in England.

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For Cosette’s (Amanda Seyfried) bedroom in the house she shares with Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) in Paris, “the set is made up of a selection of padded boards covered in beautiful pink, almost pearlized, silk, with hand-painted flowers,” Stewart explains. “We wanted to show how delicate and beautiful Cosette is and how precious she is to Valjean, like a jewel in a dollhouse. The contrast and shock of this beautiful use of color, against the slime and brutality of the dark reality of the ‘outside,’ really makes this a memorable moment in the narrative.”

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Of the production’s 92 sets constructed by some 200 carpenters, scenic painters, and sculptors, that of the idyllic Rue Plumet garden, where Valjean and Cosette lived before having to flee, is a favorite of Stewart’s. “Last winter was one of the worst in England, and everything was covered in snow,” the Oscar-nominated designer explains. “We had to grow the greens and flowers in a hotbed and actually grew our own butterflies!”

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Reclaimed barn wood was aged with chalk and wax to create the paper factory owned by Valjean, the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. The empty set shown here was constructed in the Tarring Yarn House in Chatham, England, which provided the perfect space and color palette for the barren interior. In an uncanny twist of historic irony, the yarn house produced rope for the ship that the British Royal Navy’s Admiral Nelson used to defeat Napoléon at the Battle of Trafalgar.

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In creating the streetscapes of 19th-century Paris, Stewart drew inspiration from such varied sources as Hugo’s own paintings, period newspaper illustrations, Eugène Delacroix, and New York City’s Flatiron Building (note the angular resemblance in the building at center). Paris was a city “filled with huge, skinny, badly built houses, and the crooked streets provided the perfect places for people to hide,” Stewart explains. One of the biggest challenges she faced was getting the carpenters to design off-kilter buildings that slanted to the right. Since the medieval buildings of the time were tall, the scenes for the revolution, seen here, were created on the tallest soundstage at Pinewood.

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Another challenge for the filmmakers was interpreting the material from both Hugo’s novel and the legendary Broadway production. Stewart came upon a solution by choosing a single design reference point—the work of Charles Marville, a photographer who recorded the last medieval buildings before Paris was renovated in the mid-1800s. For the “Lovely Ladies” set seen here, Stewart’s artisans (who would sing the karaoke version of the film’s anthem, “I Dreamed a Dream,” while on break) fashioned brickwork from plaster, while the crew slathered nine tons of Scottish seaweed on the walls to create an extremely lifelike harbor set.